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If somebody doesn't want to do something, they have their reasons for not doing it. Alan has his reason for not wanting to oopen up DMA-BUF much like Nvidia has its reason for not wanting to open up their code.

Hand-of sleight trick. You used two various definitions for "open" in same sentence.

Where is documenntation about the HW product that would enable good SW development ( datasheets, register models, user manuals) ?

Why are you directly comparing project based solely on reverse engineering with the one, based on 100% manufacturers suport ?

AMD opened up their documentation, and what happened with RadeonSI? One whole year and 2D accel over GLAMOR is still not even at an acceptable level.

Creative released their sound card drivers under the GPL, and what happened? Not a single person even bothered to pick up the driver and extend it to work with the newer sound cards produced by Creative.

Why should I not compare the reverse-engineered projects when the community has not even proven itself to be capable of walking the talk with vendor-provided specifications?

AMD opened up their documentation, and what happened with RadeonSI? One whole year and 2D accel over GLAMOR is still not even at an acceptable level.

Not even close. Fglrx team had ALL the documentation and access to HW all that intimate internal docs that AMD didn't care to release to anyone outside.
Also, fglrx team didn't have to live of solar energy. They got their wages for actual development.

Open source team got just smallish part of the documentation and farewell.

Creative released their sound card drivers under the GPL, and what happened? Not a single person even bothered to pick up the driver and extend it to work with the newer sound cards produced by Creative.

Which obviously mirrored market forces of open source. SW gets written where it is needed and there is sufficient interest fot it to get written.
I don't know all details around Creatie, but IIRC they did not release all info. Just like VIA for their graphics.

When I byu some piece of HW, I expect to have drivers WITH the source and documentation for the case if I decide to check or change something. Just showing some pdf on some page ( let alone that being all needed, relevant and up-to-date docs) just isn't enough for me.

Why should I not compare the reverse-engineered projects when the community has not even proven itself to be capable of walking the talk with vendor-provided specifications?

For the same reason that you can't put to the same metrics aftermaket efforts of garage entusiasts with manufacturers service of upgrading car engine or handling.

Between them is a light year of difference in-house information, equipment availability and last but not least - MONEY.

And the worst part? All of these can be potentially avoided if Nvidia is allowed to use DMA-BUF; DMA-BUF won't get splintered, and Linux users get feature parity with Windows users on launch day via the blob

You have no idea what you're talking about. This was repeated a hundred times, but apparently not often enough: it is impossible to let NVIDIA use DMA-BUF, because it's a direct violation of the kernel's license. The symbol names are just symbolic, they are GPL no matter whether they are marked as such or not. All Alan Cox did was point that out.

Multi-GPU setups which were already existent way back in 2006 and still not supported with the open drivers? 6 years and still nothing from the open drivers?

C'mon, if you want to troll, troll with some intelligence. There are people with professional notebooks and desktop setups with multi-GPU configurations who have been waiting for years just to get CrossFire and SLi support from the open drivers since day 1. And these are technologies which are almost guaranteed never to come to the open drivers because no degree of reverse engineering is going to cut it.

Why? Can you explain in detail why this would be that hard? As I see it this is a simple infrastructure problem of having multiple graphics cards attached to one X server and the slightly harder problem of sharing the 3d capabilities each of the drivers provide.

Originally Posted by Sonadow

Just because you don't use your computer for the kind of professional work that people in Windows take for granted does not give you the right to demand that they live without it in Linux. Neither does it give you the right to demand that businesses open their stuff. That fact that you even think that you can demand for such things shows just how much Linux users think they are entitled to when they don't even have the numbers to back their demands. If you have a market share of 50%, then perhaps those demands are valid, but 1.4%? Right, keep dreaming.

It's ok with me if you tolerate proprietary, closed hardware. But how can you morally defend it and call the demand for open hardware and implementations "entitlement"? Falling back on closed proprietary systems might be an ugly necessity for some people today but nothing good will come of that in the long term.

Originally Posted by Sonadow

And I also don't need to mention the hypocrisy displayed over the whole 'open-source makes everything cross-platform compatible' nonsense. Open source everything so that nobody has unfair advantages? So why are there people who are in favour of Linux-specific extensions made to key pieces of a Linux distribution stack (systemd is a very good example) that makes it completely incompatible with the BSDs? Or even the religious war that BSD is some devil which should be condemned just because Linux holds the lion's share of the alternative operating system market? By that logic the whole world, and not just AMD and Nvidia, can simply condemn Linux to death because Windows holds a 70% market share of mainstream desktop operating systems. People tout open systems and cross platform compatibility while trying to defend all actions that undermine BSD compatibility when major changes are made to the Linux software stack with claims that BSD is not relevant anymore because Linux's market share dwarves it (while conveniently forgetting that Windows crushes Linux and OS X combined in the desktop OS front). Hypocrisy at its finest, no?

I for one am not too happy with totally disregarding other systems when designing software systems but can you specify what exactly you are talking about? systemd? udev? kms?

Originally Posted by Sonadow

And all you have been doing is gloating how Nvidia cannot use DMA-BUF. Well listen up, they don't NEED to. Nvidia has already got their own proprietary form of KMS in their blob, so they sure as hell don't need to adhere to your 'standards' of how KMS should be implemented in Linux.

Try to be more condescending, this was not enough.
KMS is not asdx' standard nor is it mine or yours. It's freedesktop.org and it's an open standard that everyone can use. Even BSD. And proprietary reimplementations of open standards? Have you forgotten nvidia's randr alternative, twinview? Rotating a single screen? Sorry, not possible. Rotating all screens? Well, enjoy your graphics corruption. Or X.org crashes. I know this because I have actually tried to use a notebook with Ubuntu and an nvidia graphics card for one single application some time ago.

Originally Posted by Sonadow

And last I heard, they are already in the process of recreating their own proprietary version of DMA-BUF within the blob to get Optimus working, so all that 'I-told-you-so' attitude over DMF-BUF is of no relevance anymore.

What attitude? It's under a specific license. It's illegal to violate that license. As in it's against the law.

Originally Posted by Sonadow

And you only have Alan Cox's inflexibility to blame for that; by forcing GPL symbols only you have ended up with two versions of it that does the same purpose, and I am going to bet on it that Nvidia's proprietary implementation of DMA-BUF will surpass the original GPL-ed version in capabilities when released.

I am not sure if it would have even been possible to get the code into the xserver and the drivers without putting it under the GPL, but I am pretty sure that Alan Cox could not have changed it by his own. As I understand it he was just the one explaining the issue prominently.

Originally Posted by Sonadow

I'm not blind to the benefits of open software, and anybody with half a brain can see how an ideal world where all software is open will make computing so much easier with respect to hardware support and drivers. But that world is not going to happen in my lifetime (nor the 2 generations on my estimation), so I don't see any reason to work towards it. If it's meant to happen, it will happen whether anyone likes it or not.

Ok, imagine a world where both Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds would have had that mindset. There's a good chance most smartphones would run a highly proprietary system from apple or microsoft right now. There's a good chance the internet would run on proprietary software. But it does not because people did work towards it. Nothing is "meant to happen". If people don't do it, THEN it is not going to happen.

SLI

Originally Posted by Sonadow

Right, and where is CrossFireX and SLi support on the open drivers?
Multi-GPU setups which were already existent way back in 2006 and still not supported with the open drivers? 6 years and still nothing from the open drivers?

It's not that hard at this point, but since SLI is rather uncommon no one cares much, lots of more important things to do, for example, wouldn't you say that 1 fast card is better than 2 slow (boot clock speed) ones ...
Things really can't go any faster with a single paid dev and small number of occasional contributors. Stop whining, start coding And don't say it's too difficult to get into, that's just you not really being motivated enough.

So, what you are saying is that open source driver performs WAY better than closed source for you ?

If so, why are ayou complaining ?

And maybe it is time to practice what you preach. If your mantra is all about being nice to manufacturers, why are you so stingy ? Shell out some dough for new HD7xxx. Or perhaps two. One just because you want the card that works with closed source drivers on your config and extra one just to be "nice" and score some niceness points. And see how that works for you...

Sure you can. You can change whole laptop. Why stop partway when you can be nice to manufacturers all the way ?

If there was no open source drivers maybe AMD wouldn't have let go of the proprietary driver for my card.

Anything is possible. But let's do quick mental check here. What was the quality of AMD/ATI closed source drivers for Linux before it declared support for open source efforts ?
I remember them being totally unuseable, but who knows, maybe your experiences were different.

Interestingly, similar examples were all across the board. No one cared nor be pressured to offer decent data and drivers. If what they put on the table worked for you, fine. If not, you were offered the f*** off option.

What do you mean that open source perform better? They are much worse than the proprietary blob. I could play nexuiz very well on 12.04 but on 12.10 I get around 20 fps.

You said that on the configuration you decided to use, closed source drivers for your graphic card do not work at all, and open source ones work "badly". Ergo, open source on that example performs better.